Impact report 2025

A carbon footprint is an estimate of the potential greenhouse emissions and climate change impact of an activity, service or product, for example producing one kilogram of aquaculture feed. By definition, a carbon footprint is calculated by estimating not just the CO₂ emissions that the activity in question causes, but also factors in emissions of other greenhouse gases (such as methane and nitrous oxide) which are quantified on their global warming potential relative to CO₂.

For simplicity, all these impacts are added together and expressed as a single number in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂eq): the amount of CO₂ that would create the same amount of warming.

Another core principle of a carbon footprint is that it typically considers multiple life cycle stages of e.g. a product, not only the production process itself. In case of feed, it hence also considers the greenhouse gas emissions released during the raw material sourcing and processing and transportation, next to the feed milling itself. It even goes beyond that to also consider e.g. deforestation and land conversion events that happened up to 20 years ago on the agricultural fields where crops are grown.

Despite these general rules and definition of a carbon footprint, there are many methodological choices that one can make to calculate the emissions and climate impact, especially for products dealing with many different and complex raw material supply chains like feed. For example, how to allocate the impact to products and by-products, what databases to use, how to define the exact system boundary, how do we deal with biogenic carbon uptakes, what impact do we allocate to recycled products or waste?

These are just a few aspects where different calculation principles and choices can influence the final carbon footprint significantly. That is why it is relevant to follow specific standards so that the results are better comparable.

We use the PEFCR standard

The PEFCR Feed for Food Producing Animals (in short: PEFCR Feed) is a specific standard for the feed industry. It defines the rules on how to perform the carbon footprints based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology and aligned with ISO standards. Next to many other aspects, this standard requires carbon footprints to be reported applying the economic allocation method and to include direct land use change (LUC) emissions considering a 20-year time period. It also guides specifically on where company specific data needs to be used and where data from LCA databases can be considered. Our underlying calculation methodology is aligned with this standard, which has been third-party confirmed. We also use market-based calculation for electricity as Norwegian authorities demands from Norwegian power suppliers. 

Click here to go back to the main page for emissions based on PEFCR, including LUC and with market-based calculation for electricity. 

Forest, Land and Agriculture (FLAG)

The forest, land and agriculture sector is one of the most affected by the impacts of climate change. But it is also a significant source of emissions. It represents nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions - the largest emitting sector after energy.

To combat this issue, in September 2022 the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) launched the world’s first standard method for businesses in land-intensive sectors such as food, agriculture and forestry, to set science-based targets that include land-related emissions and removals, the Forest, Land and Agriculture (FLAG) Science Based Target Setting Guidance. Version 1.2 of the SBTi FLAG Guidance was published in March 2026.

Skretting relies heavily on forests, land and agriculture (FLAG) for the production of the raw materials we use. So, we are required to calculate our FLAG-related GHG emissions and set targets to reduce these emissions under the Science Based Targets initiative. FLAG targets will be set soon with the resubmission of our targets by our parent company Nutreco.

While the PEFCR Feed standard does not require to report on FLAG and non-FLAG emissions separately, we acknowledge that our customers are interested in these emission shares for their targets. It also gives a better understanding about the emissions. That’s why we have already started to calculate and report our FLAG GHG emissions.

Summary of key methodological choices in our carbon footprint calculations

• Standards followed: Calculations are done based on calculation principles outlined in PEFCR feed for food producing animals (2024), aligned with ISO 14040/44:2006 and the GHG Protocol Standards.
• Preferred database: GFLI; other quality-assured and accepted LCA databases (e.g. Agri-footprint, Ecoinvent) are used if no ingredient specific dataset is available in GFLI
• FLAG: We use the Agri-Footprint FLAG database to define FLAG emissions for all LCA datasets we source from Agri-Footprint, and extrapolate the AFP FLAG database information to the GFLI database, our main source of secondary carbon footprint data for raw materials. FLAG assumptions for other LCA databases (Agribalyse, Ecoinvent), which mainly cover microingredients, are: agricultural product = 100% FLAG, non-agricultural product = 100% non-FLAG. Once GFLI directly reports on FLAG and non-FLAG categories, we will apply these factors in the future.
• Supplier and certifier data: Is only taken into account when it passed a quality assessment with proven alignment with PEFCR principles, e.g. related to the allocation principle, system boundary, impact assessment method etc.
• Coverage: full bill of ingredients included, i.e. also trace elements and vitamins, in alignment with PEFCR feed standard
• Rework ingredients were assigned with average carbon footprint values of formulations across those latest formulations excl. rework.
• Where no countries of origins are available, but the sourcing country is located in Europe with availability of a European average dataset, this is assigned. Where the country of origin is unknown or know but without availability of country specific or continent average dataset, the Global average dataset is assigned. When there are no European or global average datasets available but specific country sets which are not the respective sourcing country, the European and/or global averages are calculated based on the available country specific datasets.
• Inbound logistics for feed ingredients were calculated with estimated transport distances per transportation mode and intra-continental and intercontinental global default data for international transport as given by the PEFCR Guide.

New method to calculate GHG emissions for Norwegian produced electricity increased the footprint from our own manufacturing process
In 2020 Norwegian authorities demanded that Norwegian power suppliers moved from location based to a market-based CO₂eq calculation with background in EU's Renewable Energy Directive. This is in compliance with the science-based target initiative (SBTI) which Skretting has committed to through our mother company Nutreco. For our standard calculations we use the market-based calculation for electricity for every year. The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE), no longer reports emission factors for location-based, so we will stop the alternative reporting for location-based calculations from the 2023 report and forward.